 Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar for Give Big St. Croix Valley. I just wanted to go ahead and get started before we dive into the presentation. I want to make sure that everybody can see me or see my screen and hear me talk. So if you can hear me, just put yes into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. I'm going to flip through the first couple of slides. So use the question box and just let me know yes, you can hear me. Yes, you can see my screen and you can see me flipping through a couple of the slides. Okay, it seems to be a quiet crowd. Is everybody able to hear me and see my screen? If you can hear me and see my screen, just go into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and type yes. Okay, perfect. Thank you, Andrea. All right, so welcome. We'll go ahead and get started. We've got a smaller crowd here today, but hopefully it's a small but mighty crowd. My name is Linda Gerhardt. I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. My email address is on this slide if you'd like to get in touch with me. I've been working with the Give Big Team for a few years at this point, and it's always a fantastic giving day, and I'm really happy to be part of it again. And I also have Sarah on the line, Sarah Haas from the United Way of St. Croix Valley. She's going to be listening in and she'll also be present for a question and answer session at the end of the presentation. Here is a quick look at today's agenda. We're actually going to start off with a quick update and demonstration of our new dashboard, which you all should have received an email notification about, but if not, you're going to get the full scoop on this webinar. And then we're going to move into a quick review of giving day basics just for anybody who may have missed our first webinar or may need a refresher, and then we'll dig into campaign strategy and how to win prizes. And I mentioned this before, but just as a quick note, we are going to do a Q&A session at the end of this webinar, and Sarah is on for that as well, so you can pick her brain as well as mine. But if you do have a question while I'm presenting, just type that into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel, and we'll make sure to get to it during the time that we've carved out for questions. All right, so onto the new dashboard. So most of you probably received an email from our CEO, Tom Matthews, alerting you to a dashboard update, but just in case you didn't get that email or it got sorted into your spam folder, or you just didn't open it because you had a lot in your inbox that day. The basic information is that we updated our dashboard for organization profiles last week on March 10. This is a dashboard where you'll be spending a lot of time during GiveBig, so this directly affects you if you're participating in GiveBig St. Croix Valley. However, we didn't just update the dashboard because we felt like it. There was a very specific purpose, and that was, A, making it load faster, making it more intuitive to navigate and easier to find what you're looking for, and B, there were some important technical changes in the code that sets us up to make future updates to your fundraising tools more easily, add more features, and make Mighty Cause as a platform bigger and better. So we're hoping to continue improving your dashboard and all of the tools available to you, and as part of that change, things look a little bit different or not organized slightly differently. And we've also moved most of our editing of the profile onto the profile itself, so it's even easier to edit your profile and get it ready for GiveBig. So I'm going to give you a quick walkthrough of the new dashboard in a second, but here are some of the key changes to check out. If you manage more than one page, you can actually toggle between them from your dashboard, which is a really cool feature. You used to have to do that in your user account menu. The organization is really simple and easy to follow. All of your fundraising tools are right under fundraising. All of your reports are under reports, and your settings are under settings, and that's about as easy as it could possibly get. If you see something in gray on your dashboard, that's an advanced feature. Advanced is our subscription service, and if you wanted to try that out, we do offer a free trial so you can take those features for a test drive during GiveBig. You have quick, easy access to all of your reports, and we've pulled out the reports so you don't need to find a tab that's in a specific report. They're all super easy to find. Finally, your donor experience tool is still there, and we're going to talk about that a bit in this webinar, but it's actually just been changed to checkout flow because that's the actual function of donor experience. We thought that was a little bit easier for everybody to understand and more descriptive of what the tool actually does, so your donor experience is just now called checkout flow. The other big change that came with this dashboard was editing. Now, there's no need to click on anything in your dashboard to edit. You can just click and edit right into your profile. So Mighty Cause profiles for nonprofits were about 80% of the way there. You could just do a lot of inline editing, but now more or less everything is just done right on the page. You can toggle between edit mode and live mode, excuse me, which means how your page will appear to visitors. So using a switch at the top of your profile, and I'll show you where that is in just a moment. And you can also use the quick edit tool if you want to find something specific to edit if you're looking for a particular section. So once you select it, you'll jump straight to that section of the page. When you're editing, anything with a plus sign will add something to your page and anything with a pencil will allow you to edit something that already exists on your page. So for instance, if you wanted to add a goal, you'd click the plus sign to add your goal and then go over to the pencil icon and tell us how you actually want your goal to display. All right. And with that, I'm going to just go into a quick demo of an organization profile. This is the Mighty Cause Foundation's organization profile and I am logged in as an administrator. And so this should look fairly familiar to you. This is what your profile looks like now, but I just wanted to take you on a quick tour of it. Your dashboard is over here. It's now white, which a lot of people find a little bit easier to read rather than lighter text on a dark background. You can make it go away here, make it come back by pressing that. So that's very easy. If you wanted more space to work while you're editing your page, you can do that. And then just click on these three lines to make your dashboard come back. And this is what I was talking about. If you have multiple pages that you manage, you can actually manage them from right here. So if I manage another nonprofit in addition to Mighty Cause Foundation, I can just go here and switch to that page. I don't have to go up into my profile anymore and make the change there. I can just do it right from my dashboard. So you have an overview of everything that's in, everything that's happened on your page. I'm just going to skip this intro, that little tutorial. And it will show me my metrics, anything that Mighty Cause wants to tell you, your to-do list, and our latest blog post. So this is just your standard welcome screen. We have fundraising tools. Everything is under Carrot. So these little arrow guys over here, if you want to expand a section when you're looking for something specific, you can just click that carrot and just go to whatever you'd like. So you can go to your profile from here. And the tutorial is going to be there for a little while, but that should go away. Campaigns to manage all of your peer-to-peer campaigns. Your checkout flow. The same as it was, nothing has really changed except for the name, matching grants, which we're going to talk about a lot in this webinar. And that's basically everything. All of the fundraising tools, these little guys here with the little teardrops next to them, those are all advanced features that you can try out if you'd like to start a free trial of advanced. And then all of your reports are under reports. And the thing that's really cool that I wanted to point out here is that you have quick, easy access from your dashboard. So you can pull your main donation report and take a look at that. You can look at your offline donations, all of your recurring donations, those are separated out. So if you want to see everybody who's making a recurring contribution to your nonprofit, you can just go right to that report. Your donor retention report, which we are going to talk about a bit. And then your disbursement report. So when you start getting the money, if you're like, oh, what's in this disbursement, you can find that here. And one thing that I think is super cool is if you want to add an offline donation, if someone sends you a check or a cash donation, you can actually just start that process right here. You just click that little plus sign. So that's super easy. Everything is more or less the same. It's just a slightly better organization. And then you have your settings. Your organization settings are the same. Integrations is an advanced feature that is using Zapier to connect to different programs. You can manage your admins as well. So you can go from here and just manage everything you would normally manage for your nonprofit. You can change your admins. If you have somebody who no longer works there. But that is basically it. I just want to take you through a couple of quick editing notes. And again, you can just quick, quick, skip the tips to get out of that, that tutorial. But yeah, as I mentioned, everything here is mostly pencils. So if you want to change your image, you just click that, your logo rather, you just click that pencil icon. If you want to change your display name, all of these things, you can just quickly edit by clicking. If you want to toggle between live mode and see how it looks to visitors and get rid of anything that is appearing to you as an administrator, you can just toggle this button to edit mode and live mode. So that is right here. And we'll go back into edit mode. And then you also have the quick edit button here. So if I want to go to my featured campaigns, it just takes me right to that section. So I can start adding campaigns to this section. One thing I did want to show you is your goals and how to reset your metrics. We used to have a separate area for that, but now it's easy. It's right on the page. So if I want to edit my goal, well, let me hide it first. So if you don't have a goal there, you just want to do add a goal. And then it'll put whatever is the default there for you. And then you can just click edit. And you can tell us exactly what you want your goal to be. So when you're resetting your metrics for this year, you can set your goal there. And if you want to change what's displaying, you can do that by just clicking on the little pencil icon near your overall metrics in this area. So that is really easy to do. And if you want to hide it, you can do that as well. And then you can add it back in at any time. All of these changes are temporary. They're auto safe. So you don't have to click a save button unless one appears to you. And it's very obvious to you, but everything else is just kind of click and edit. So it should be super easy to do. But if you have any questions, you can always reach out to our support team. And with that, I will go ahead and switch back to the webinar. All right. So I hope everybody was able to see that. As I mentioned, we do have our customer support team available to you. If you need any assistance with this change, if you're not sure where to find anything, our team is here to help you. We have a whole support library. And there is a dedicated support article to your new dashboard. So you can check there first. We're also updating all of those articles. So the screenshots are current. You can also email us. Email is fastest for our team. Our support email is support at mighty cause.com. But if phone support is a little bit easier for you, you can also give us a call at 202-800-1618 between nine to five Eastern time. We are an hour ahead of you. And just as a quick tip to getting as quick help as possible from our team, making sure that it's clear what link you're talking about, what page you're talking about, sending any screenshots if you're experiencing an issue. Those are all ways to help our team troubleshoot for you. So that can be a way to set yourself up for a quick response so that your issue or your question can get resolved as easily as possible. And again, if you have any questions about the dashboard change, just pop them into the questions box on your go-to webinar panel, and I will get to them at the end of the webinar. All right. And with that out of the way, let's move back to the subject at hand, which is Give Big St. Corrie Valley. As I'm sure you all know, Give Big St. Corrie Valley is on Tuesday, April 28th this year. And it is 24 hours of online giving. It kicks off at midnight on the 28th and ends at midnight the following day. So it's midnight to midnight. Registration is already underway, and Sarah has been gracious enough to extend the deadline for registration. So now you can actually still register for the event. April 1st is the date when early giving begins at this point. I am talking to Sarah about it, but at this point the date is April 1st. That's when you can begin accepting donations toward your Give Big Totals. And the same as every year, the first step is to register your nonprofit for the event. There's just a really short form to fill out, and it should be quick and easy. There is a $100 registration fee for the event that must be paid through an outside link that will be provided for you as you go through the registration process. But you can also get in touch with Sarah if you have any questions about the fee or difficulty accessing that page. Approval is quick. It's within 24 to 48 business hours. 48 is really long for this event to hear a response. So you'll hear back pretty quickly. Obviously on a Saturday, you will have to wait until Monday, but it's usually a very quick process. And just to let you know, you can add and remove other administrators for your nonprofit after you're registered. As I mentioned in the demo, you can add them at any time through your profile. But when you register for the event, you are actually asking for access to your page. So if you don't already have administrative access to your Mighty Cause page, that's okay. Just fill out the registration form and we'll grant you access as part of the process of registering. Once you are registered, I do highly recommend checking out the nonprofit toolkit, spending some time with it. Sarah has put this together for you with the Mighty Cause team. It's a really great resource. It's basically a resource library where you can find previous trainings, tips and how to's. You can download templates for emails and social media posts. You can find a timeline. You can find logos and everything you need there. It's a really huge help when you're just getting oriented to the event. Or if you missed our first webinar, you can check that out in the nonprofit toolkit as well. So now we're going to move on to the real meat of this webinar, which is campaign strategy. The first thing that you should do as part of your campaign strategy is to customize your Mighty Cause profile. We spent an hour in the first webinar discussing the finer points of how to do this. And we'll review some of the most important pieces again. But your nonprofit's profile is really the face of your organization during Give Big. So it's important to make sure that it's looking good. The link that you'll share is the link to your organization's profile with your supporters. So unless you have a different campaign going on if you have an event or if you're using a peer-to-peer page, that's absolutely fine. But for most nonprofits, the link to your profile on Mighty Cause is what you're going to share with your supporters to participate in Give Big when you can start getting donations on April 1st. What you'll want to do is customize the look and feel and make it really showcase your nonprofit's brand and the work that you do in your community. Having a profile that looks outdated or doesn't look like it's been given really any love can turn donors off. They wonder, is this legit? Is this really the nonprofit? And it just doesn't present a good face to the donor who's looking to support you. So if you show your nonprofit some love, usually donors will also show you love back. This is your space to really make the case for why it's important to give to your nonprofit and support your work and talk about all the great things that you do in your community. So get in there, get on your profile and make sure that it's not only up to date and has current information, but is also making a really compelling case for why people should make donations to your organization during Give Big. One of the key things that I was talking about that you want to customize is your checkout flow because this is part of the story that your nonprofit is telling and it's your direct appeal to donors. You're really hitting donors at a really critical time with the checkout flow. Click donate, you've got them and they're deciding how much they want to give. And what we've learned from years of doing this on Mighty Cause is that most donors really haven't made up their mind at this point. They know they're going to give, but they don't really know how much. So this is an opportunity to ask them for a specific amount, which you would use your suggested donations amount for and make a case for why that particular amount is important with your descriptions. All of these things are customizable. So check in with your checkout flow and make sure that it's consistent with your campaign story. If you're just doing the defaults and not adding descriptions, you're really missing out on an important messaging opportunity and an opportunity to boost what your donors give. As for what works best here, tying the amounts that you're asking for to a specific and real-world item or service is something that's always successful because as we know, people like to give in-kind donations. So picking something out at a store, like whether it's a can of food or a toy for a dog in an animal shelter and then giving that to the nonprofit and feeling like they're giving something real to that organization. So if you can recreate that experience with your checkout flow, that is a great way to motivate donors to give more. So for instance, if you're a food pantry saying that $50 will feed a family of four for two weeks or whatever the number is, is a very compelling ask that something tangible donors want to give and it can push donors from giving $25 to giving that $50. So this is a really critical point at which you want to talk to donors about what you do and reinforce the messaging that's on your page. You'll also want to preview the checkout process just to make sure that it's not too long or cumbersome and that you're also getting all of the information that you need. So you can do that when you do view checkout. That's that button right on the checkout flow page. So you can preview it from beginning to end and just make sure that the process is easy and that you're getting everything you need from donors without overburdening them with a long process for checking out. And you'll also want to make sure excuse me that you create or update your thank you page and that your thank you message for 2020 is updated. A lot of people forget about this and it is, sorry, it's right here. It's this tab right here. Just toggle over to it. A lot of people can forget about this because it's easy to forget about. But it is really important because that is your thank you page is what people see as soon as they complete their donation and your message is actually embedded in the receipt that they receive from Mighty Cause, their tax receipt. So you're automating some of the thank yous that your donors get and buying yourself a little bit of time to do a more comprehensive thank you. So just make sure that it's personal and it's up to date for 2020 and that you have an old date in there or old information in there and that you're making as strong and personal and passionate thank you as you possibly can in those messages. If you want to do well and give big one of the best things that you can do is start getting donations early. This year you can start accepting donations on April 1st. We'll let you know if that changes but right now the date is April 1st and this will help you build momentum and basically get some money in the bank to speak before the big day. It is worth mentioning that these are real-time donations. These are not pledges. They process immediately and they will appear on the leaderboards when the event begins. So you'll basically start with a running start. They'll appear on the leaderboards as soon as the event switches over to the live event and you'll already have some money there. So that kind of puts you ahead of some of the competition and makes your nonprofit look good. People like to give when other people have already given. Early giving period is a great time to do some targeted outreach to people you know will show up to support you during Give Big. So people like your board members, recurring donors, your staff and volunteers, people who've given to you in the past. These are generally called seed donations because they help the amount that you raise overall grow. And one thing that people are usually concerned about with early giving is whether they're basically going to wear people out and get them to give their gift too early because they're likely to get out on donations on the big day. And I just want to reassure you that in general this is not what we see when nonprofits target early giving. They tend to get people to give more than once, which is how you increase the overall amount that you raise. And that's why it's really important to target your tried and true supporters here because these are not people who are likely to just give you $25 before the event and then not come back and help you out on April 28th. They're likely to give you more and more. And if you think about how you tend to give, if you're approached once by an organization you really care about, you'll give. And then when you're approached again a few weeks later and they make another appeal to you, you'll probably give again if you have the money and we're talking about a month here. So people have gotten paid again. They're going to give more than once. They're not just going to give once and forget about you, especially if they're afraid to take advantage of early giving. Overall what we see is that when nonprofits take advantage of early giving during a giving event, the total amount they raise is boosted. So this is a great way, especially if you've participated and give big in the past, to boost the amount that you're raising during the event. Another big key to doing well during give big is securing a matching grant. On Mighty Cause, across the board, we see that nonprofits that have matching grants raise more money. We talked about this in our first webinar, which was really more of a technical discussion of matching grants. But a matching grant is basically just a large donation that you leverage to match other donations. So it's a Bogo deal on donations more or less. So just as an example, if you have a major donor who gives you $1,000 every year for give big, instead of just taking the check and saying you could use that $1,000 as a match. And that means that when somebody donates 25, you give them, you match $25 from that $1,000 pool of donations and you turn it into a $50 donation. This is essentially display money. You're not really changing the amount that's given, but it's a really great marketing tool. It's a great way to get people excited. People love a good deal and feeling like they're getting more for their money. So this is appealing to donors and when you use it strategically it can boost donations when you really need them. The process of getting a matching grant has three basic steps which are the same as really getting any sort of major gift. You prospect which is basically just coming up with a short list of people or businesses that might be willing to provide a match based on having given to you in the past in large amounts. And good places to start prospecting for a matching grant are your board of directors. It's important to remember that fundraising is part of a responsibility of board of directors. So don't be afraid to ask your board to provide a match. They can pool together money. One board member may also want to pony up some money on their own as part of their yearly giving to your nonprofit, but don't be afraid to match your board. That's the first place you want to start. Any community sponsors, major gift donors and so on. That just means starting the conversation telling them about your give big campaign what you've got planned and feeling out how open they might be to providing a match. And then you just ask and seal the deal and something that really helps here is pitching it as something that's mutually beneficial. It's a partnership for donors who are individuals. That means making it clear and pitching it as allowing their nonprofit, their gift to your nonprofit to be more than the amount they give because other donors into the fold and inspiring them to give. So it's allowing them to do more with the money that they're contributing. And for sponsors and people or businesses in the community things like shouting them out on social media, giving them good PR emphasizing the good that they do in your community and how happy you are that they partnered with you can all make it a more appealing ask. So you just want to tailor it to suit whoever you're asking and just sort of pitch it as a mutually beneficial partnership. There's lots of options when it comes to matches so be flexible. One to one matches are the most common but the tool on Mighty Cause lets you match percentages. You can do a threshold match which means that all donations will be matched once you get to a certain amount. So if your goal is a thousand dollars and you want to set it so that after you get to that amount the match kicks in. You can actually do that with the Mighty Cause tool. Be open to working out the terms of the match with your grantor and be a little flexible with the amount that they give and let them sort of lead that discussion. One thing that you can also do is pull together donations into a match pool that's bigger and have multiple or you can also have multiple matches throughout the day. You can just schedule them to fire. So for instance during a power hour which is new this year and we're going to talk about that having a five hundred dollar match available can be a really huge boon even if it's one that's on the smaller side for a matching grant. So smaller matches can still be very mighty as long as you're creative and strategic in how you use them. At the end of the day as I said a matching grant is just a marketing tool and if you aren't promoting your match it may as well not even exist so you'll need to promote it. The first things first enter into your matching grants tool on Mighty Cause. We've made some updates so you can add a little logo for your match and there's a countdown to add urgency and you'll see that sticker on your donate button so everybody who donates while you have a matching grant active will know that their donation is being matched. Next you'll want to promote it on social media so schedule some hype posts before the match becomes available and also schedule some posts when it goes live and give some updates during the match so that people can see your progress. And you'll want to promote it in emails too. For instance if you're able to secure several matching grants anytime you promote your give big campaign in email you should be mentioning that you have X amount available in matching grants. That's a huge draw for donors. And then you can also provide a schedule to help people plan their gifts. Send out an email when grants go live and basically just market the heck out of your matching grants when you're able to secure one. This is a huge deal it really motivates donors and you don't have to worry about being repetitive. People may see social media posts but not an email or vice versa. So just anytime you promote give big St. Croix Valley if you've got a matching grant go ahead and promote that grant alongside of it. Peer to peer fundraising is another strategy that will increase the overall amount you raise during give big. And in case you need a refresher or you're new to give big this year peer to peer fundraisers are campaigns for your organization and they ask their social network to donate to your cause they have their own little page their own link and they're asking the people that they know to make a contribution to a cause that's important to them. The reason that this will increase the amount you raise is that most of these donors are going to be new to your organization. You're not targeting the same people as your peer to peer fundraisers they have access to a different audience than you do. We actually do have a great new tool called fundraiser templates. That makes it even easier for people to fundraise for you because you can pre fill sections of their fundraiser for them so that they can get published sooner and just start raising money. Now board members can be really effective peer to peer fundraisers asking staff volunteers your social media followers can be super effective as well. The real beauty of peer to peer fundraising is that it gets people talking about their connection to your cause and why they care about your nonprofit why they're driven to support you which builds word of mouth and is also just a really great fundraising angle that your nonprofits marketing people would have a hard time replicating. People also tend to trust their peers telling them that this organization is great. I love their work. I trust them so first time donors are more likely to give when it's a friend asking them and if your nonprofit is already you can actually ramp things up a bit with a team or event fundraiser which is basically just group peer to peer fundraising and adds up the element of friendly competition. And just to be clear any and all donations made to peer to peer pages are counted on leader boards they count for prizes as long as they're made within the windows for which they're eligible for those prizes and as long as they're made online they're processed just like any donations caused to your nonprofit. So there's no middleman no one who ever starts a peer to peer page has access to that funding or your financial information. Those pages those peer to peer pages are hooked up to your organization's profile and it's just a different pathway for people to give. So you don't have to worry about there being a middleman they go straight to your organization's profile they end up in your donations report and they do show on leader boards and are eligible for prizes. Email is a big part of doing well on a giving day and I just wanted to share with you some best practices. Definitely with social media mostly using algorithms to decide what kind of content to show its users. Email is your most direct connection to your donors. So it should be a cornerstone of your gift big strategy. Generally people don't really read emails as much as they skim them. So you want to keep emails pretty short and sweet and make them skimmable so that people can get the idea and what you want them to do very quickly. They're not going to read a wall of text but they might skim it. So things like headers headlines images and so on are really important to put in there because most people skim an email for that information. An important thing to consider when you're building your email is that people always always always click on the first image or link that's in an email. I don't know why but across the board I've been doing email marketing a long time that is the most clicked link in any email. So pay attention to what you make that first link. It's really important real estate and for gift big I'd highly recommend making sure that your first link goes right to your organization's profile on Mighty Cause so that they land on that page and they can see your donation appeal and likely that's going to be the main call to action in your email anyway. You'll want to segment your audiences and what I mean by that is that if you say had a list of 5000 people who've signed up for your email list you want to break that down into smaller groups so that you can communicate with them more specifically. For instance you might want to separate your email list into past give big donors, recurring donors, people who are on your list who have never actually given a cash donation to your organization so that you can tweak your emails to them ever so slightly to be more specific to who they are and how they give to your nonprofit. So you're not building a completely new email from scratch for each audience you're just taking the email that you've built and you're tweaking it a little bit for these certain audiences. The purpose here is taking care of the people or is taking care to talk to the people who already support you talking more specifically to them and making personalized appeals. People respond more strongly to things that are personalized and acknowledge the relationship they have with your nonprofit rather than a big blast email to everybody that's not really talking to anyone specifically. So this is more specific and intentional than a big blast to everyone. Now that doesn't mean that there's no room for blast to your entire list. You'll just also want to schedule some segmented outreach alongside of that. Consider your email schedule and timing. Make sure you're sending out emails when you need to. For instance when you have a prize that you're trying to win or a match that's available. Make sure that you use a mobile friendly template. Most systems are all mobile friendly templates. You don't want to do that. You just want to make sure and you also want to test your emails on mobile devices to ensure that it looks good and functions properly. Because sometimes things look great on a desktop computer. When you look at them on your phone in Gmail it looks really weird. So you just want to make sure that your email looks as good as possible. Copy edit your emails and test your links. Because I have to tell you there's nothing worse on this list of people and realizing that you have a broken link or you sent people to the wrong page. So try to have at least two people check each email you send. This is a great thing that volunteers can get involved with remotely as well as you can enlist them to copy edit your emails for you. And finally when you need to have a clear ask and what I mean by that is that not using wishy-washy language like please support us or thank you for your gift. You want to say things like donate now or give now that create urgency. Soft languages and soft language and soft asks don't really rally people to donate now. So make sure that your calls to action are actually built to be calls to action. You want them to be action oriented and urgent. So social media has gotten a little bit trickier in recent years because Twitter, Facebook and Instagram they all use algorithms to determine what appears in users feeds. And what that means for you is that someone who follows you may not see something that you post today until later in the week which kind of stinks. So we recommend starting to promote your campaign early and honestly what gets your posts seen by more people is early engagement and what I mean by that is people clicking on it, people sharing it, people commenting. Those are all things that are considered engagement and what most of these algorithms do is they look for content that's getting that early engagement and they'll sort of be more likely to put that in the feeds of people who follow those those accounts. So encouraging your staff and volunteers to like and share your posts so you're more likely to show up in people's feeds can be a really good strategy volunteers as well just get them all on board and say hey if you see a post from us please like it and share it and comment on it. You know I wouldn't do that in the post but just sort of separately let them know that this will help you get a lot of big when we really need people to see our posts at a certain time. Using stories on Facebook and Instagram is also a really great way to boost engagement as a fun fact a lot of people on Instagram do not even look at posts anymore they watch people's stories. So anytime you post put it in your stories as well if you use Instagram Facebook also has a stories feature and that'll help you get some additional engagement and get people's attention. We recommend seeing in your comfort zone for a giving day like give big and that means just basically going with where your biggest audience is. If your biggest audience is on Facebook spend the most time dealing with Facebook and so on because you don't need to go out of your comfort zone or try to figure out a new platform or how to make Instagram work if you're not really active on Instagram throughout the year just go where your people are. And finally I recommend scheduling as much as you can ahead of time using the publishing tools that are available to you and also make sure pardon me make sure that someone is available to interact on the big day so someone who can respond to comments who can you know answer questions answer messages and direct messages just have someone available who can be attentive to your social media platforms because that's also going to help with engagement when you have conversations happening in your comments so have someone available to you know respond to people's comments you know like their comments and interact with individuals who are interacting with your nonprofit on social media and then you also want to create engaging content that's creative a link post is fine and fantastic but things that do really well on social media tend to be photos a campaign video again stories which are the you know the features that go away in 24 hours you can use those to sort of grab people's attention more so than a big long text post so definitely having a campaign video is something that I would recommend if you're able to get one together you don't need to have fancy tools to do this or a videographer iPhones take fantastic videos and you can use free editing apps on iPhones to create a great campaign campaign video YouTube has an editor that you can use to edit together a video that's totally free so just use the tools that are available to you can c a n v is in Victor a they're a really great resource if you don't have Photoshop or don't know how to use Photoshop you can really make great social media images they have templates that you can use that look fantastic so you know try different services and get some more content rather than just here's a link please give to us because those are videos and images are things that people are much more likely to interact with and then lastly always include a link with your social media posts sometimes people forget that because you know they put their video up and they're focusing so hard on the content but you know make sure that people can get to the page where they can actually give to you so on Facebook and Twitter that's pretty easy just copy and paste the link to your profile in there in Instagram you'll most likely want to make that the link in your your bio your profile on Instagram so just let people know that's where the link is that's where you can get to our page and make a donation so especially since a lot of you have participated in a few give big St. Croix valleys over the years it's important to focus on donor retention and that is getting the people who gave to your past campaigns to come back and give again this year so that you can easily gauge your donor retention your rate is calculated right for you on the report and you can actually pull a report of donors who have not yet been retained so that you can get some focus communication going with them your ask is really two fold with donor retention you're asking them to give again and you're also asking them to increase the amount of their gift so you may want to do some segmentation here like we talked about with emails so you can target people who gave last year people who gave the year before that but not in 2019 and also by amount so that you can try to bump people up to the next level of giving one thing I also highly highly highly recommend is building an email in whatever program you use constant contact MailChimp whatever it is that you use and having it ready to go on April 28th and then see how you're doing that day and then maybe around the end of the day seven or eight p.m. pull the report of the people who have not yet been retained plug them into the email list and then send them an email asking them to give again they get a little bit more urgent but having that ready to go and being able to quickly pull that list and put those people in there allows you to be more likely to recapture them it's kind of a donor retention Hail Mary but it does actually work we've seen that happen with organizations who pulled that and sent out an email and then boom they get a bunch of donations and they retain more donors so getting that together and having it ready on April 28th is a really great way to boost your retention and raise more overall all right we're in the home stretch here and this is the last strategy I wanted to chat about which is follow up because sometimes when you're done with a giving day especially you know since this giving day is going to be a little bit strange there's weird things happening in the community a really important thing to remember even if you're tired even if you are done with give Big St. Croix Valley on the day after is having a personal and prompt thank you you want to make sure that the donors are thanked and that you're following up with them so you want to not only thank them we have tools where you can automate that and buy yourself a little bit time but things like doing handwritten cards volunteers can help with that sending them in the mail sending them a letter calling them on the phone those are all really important touch points after a giving event is over and makes people more likely to give again the other thing you want to pay attention to is if you were talking about something specific when you were fundraising like you were fundraising for a new roof if you were fundraising to for something specific you want to close the loop and in general even if you weren't doing that you want to report on your results how much you've paid how much you raised how much if you hit your goal you want to thank everybody wrap up the event with a nice bow so you can be done with it you want to also get everybody into your year round stewarding plan to start cultivating relationships with the donors you picked up and the donors who participated you definitely want to pay special attention to people who are new donors to your organization whether that is filling them up and finding out more about them and what they care about and what brought them to you or just sending them an email series to welcome them to your organization and get them more familiar with your work make sure that those first time donors have some sort of path to follow so that you don't lose them that you can retain them and you can get them involved in your next campaign so don't forget about follow up even if you're really tired after the event make sure that you have a plan in place to get these donors engaged in your nonprofit year round all right so I wanted to spend some time talking about prizes so leaderboards are really the center of the action for Give Big St. Croix Valley and just as a note we haven't really done a formal prize announcement so keep your eyes open for an announcement from Sarah regarding that but the leaderboards to my understanding are going to be much like they have been in past years so most unique donors they're going to be $10 raised that includes all donations made after April 1st so once early giving starts any donations will be in this leaderboard they'll be included in your total these leaderboards are searchable so people can find you from the leaderboard and you can see where you are using the little magnifying class you can search for your nonprofit if you don't see that you're in the top 10 or so and it also displays the total amount raised that means individuals that means if somebody gives 10 different donations on 10 different occasions but they're one person they are counted as one donor but these should be familiar to you if you've participated in Give Big Before and just keep your eyes peeled for an announcement regarding you know the prizes that are available for the leaderboards golden tickets should be familiar to everybody they are random prizes that are awarded to any nonprofit that gets donations during that hour these are associated with a particular donor so be sure to thank that donor if they helped you win a golden ticket so you get an additional prize for having a donation made it just randomly gets pulled by our system but it will show the donor's name unless they've chosen to be anonymous so make sure to reach out to that donor and just say hey you helped us win some extra cash for our nonprofit thank you very much every nonprofit really has an equal opportunity to win but the little bit of strategy that is involved is if you get more donations when there's a golden ticket available you basically it's like a raffle you have more entries into that pool that our system is pulling from so by driving donations to your page during a golden ticket hour you have more of a likelihood of winning you're basically just tipping the odds in your favor and we're going to have more information about the golden ticket schedule when prizes are announced but definitely golden tickets should be familiar to you they're random prizes it's just a little cash boost throughout the day and anybody who gets a donation during that hour is eligible for a golden ticket win and this year we're also adding power hours this is new so I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about how power hours work they are high value competitive prizes so a power hour depending on the particular hour some will be most dollars raised some will be most donors the organizations that hit that benchmark during that hour they bring in the most money or they bring in the most individual donors they will win a high value prize and these things are magic because they allow you to market to donors you can say to them hey during this hour if you donate to our nonprofit you help us potentially win lots of money our organization that helps us do our work year round so it's a really great marketing tool it really helps drive donations people want to help you win and if you are strategic in how you approach this we will have a schedule available for you so you can plan some communications around power hours you can really see the amount that you raise get boosted and see traffic and donations spike during those hours so stay tuned for a schedule for those so what I like to think of them is they are kind of a golden ticket but instead of being randomly chosen our system is looking for the organizations that either raise the most money or brought in the highest number of donors so they are competitive you have to target them you have to have some kind of strategy around them and this is a really fun addition because it helps you build your campaign strategy it helps you build your email and social media strategy and it helps you market to donors more effectively so definitely stay tuned for a schedule for power hours Sarah and I are working this out together and we are not quite ready to announce it yet but she has been working really hard on it making sure that it's fair to everybody and everybody has an equal chance to win and that these are really high value for your nonprofit so these should be an exciting addition and I think when you see the schedule it will make a lot more sense because you either want to drive donations and ask for big donations get people to give in large numbers and really get them excited about giving to your nonprofit alright, so that is it for the presentation today I do want to take some time to answer questions so if you do have a question related to campaign strategy the new dashboard power hours, golden tickets anything you've got go ahead and plug that question into the questions box in your go-to webinar panel and Sarah, are you there? yep, I'm here alright, I'm still waiting for questions it's a little bit of a quiet crowd today so guys if you have anything you want to pick my brain about or pick Sarah's brain about or you're unclear about after the presentation feel free to just ask us questions and I'll give you guys a minute to type those in as Linda mentioned I will be working with her we're going to get out a communication on prizes and how those will work they'll be very similar to last year with the exception of the new power hours and then the early giving Linda can you remind me the early giving counts towards winners but that would be the only leader board that it would count towards in terms of for the prizes correct yeah it would count for any leader boards we build so any overall event leader boards early giving would count toward typically it doesn't count toward any hourly prizes because obviously you know those are the space of an hour so those the only donations that come in during that hour count but it should count toward your totals on any leader board and I think last year we had two leader boards so they should be on the leader boards but they don't count toward early giving or they don't count toward golden tickets and power hours and we've kind of got crickets today I'm sure people are kind of feeling shy and a little burned out from everything that's happening in the world but one thing I did want to mention you guys should all be getting an email soon inviting you to we're doing a webinar twice next week about moving your spring fundraiser online because obviously there's a lot happening in the world things are being cancelled you know you may have had a great event in person event planned and you can't make that happen now because we all are practicing social distancing and trying to keep our community safe so we're going to talk about how you can use digital strategies to you know take advantage of spring fundraising it's one of the busiest seasons for nonprofits but how to adjust to the social distancing measures we're all taking now and sort of adjust any plans you had for an in-person fundraiser or in-person event to be digital only so keep an eye out for an email with an invite to that webinar there are two dates for that webinar and we're giving it twice to make sure that everybody has a chance to participate if they want and I'm hosting that so you know if that's something that's a concern to you which you know it's a concern to a lot of people we've been getting a lot of questions about it we're going to do a full hour about how to survive how to survive this time and still fundraise for your nonprofit because everybody's services are still needed you need to pay your staff you need to go out in your community and do what you do so yeah keep an eye out for that okay I don't think we have any questions today but if you guys have either a question for me or Sarah we're always available to you so you can always feel free to reach out to us privately and if you have a technical concern or question you can feel free to reach out to Mighty Cause Support we're here to help you especially related to the new dashboard if you're having trouble finding something or editing something just let us know and we'll help you get through it thank you Linda all right thank you so much Sarah yep bye bye